1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a vertical handover control algorithm, especially a vertical handover control algorithm for integrated WLAN and UMTS system, which consists of a throughput-based mapping function, QoS-based dynamic handover thresholds, and performance-based trigger timers for improving the transmission throughput of non-real-time services and substantially reducing the packet loss rate of the real-time services by reducing the vertical handover frequency.
2. Discussion of Related Art
The wireless local area network (WLAN) has been standardized in the IEEE 802.11. It is characterized by high-speed transmission (up to 54 Mbps) and low deployment cost. On the other hand, with higher deployment cost, the third generation wireless system, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), has the advantage of a wider coverage but lower transmission rates (up to 384 kbps outdoor and 2.3 Mbps indoor). The complementary characteristics between the mobility and data rates of these two systems make the integrated WLAN and UMTS system essential to future wireless systems. To establish this new heterogeneous wireless network while disregarding inner-network resource management problems, the initial network selection and the vertical handover control between networks are also critical. In vertical handover, there are three design challenges: (1) no common pilot, (2) QoS support between networks, and (3) ping-pong effect.
Several aspects of the vertical handover algorithms have been investigated for solving those challenges. Due to the lack of standard for vertical handover between UMTS and WLAN systems, those studies and proposed schemes have different considerations and principles for designing this integrated system. That causes deficiency of complete and exact methods suiting for the integrated systems; for example, some may focus on the network layer design while some may pay attention to physical study. Most important, those studies usually consider the different characteristics for UMTS and WLAN systems only and skip the QoS control for achieving different applications' requirements.
Referring to US Patent Publication No. 20040067754, “System and Method for Supporting Quality of Service in Vertical Handovers between Heterogeneous Networks”, a system and a method have been disclosed to support vertical handover between heterogeneous networks, which is characterized by establishing handover paths to accommodate a plurality of QoS properties. In this method, several block units are utilized to make up the vertical handover procedure, where each block handles the individual works; however, the relationship between each block are ignored, which may cause the degradation of the QoS performance for different requirements. Also, the frequency of the signal transmission and the overhead may be higher due to the numerous blocks and will degrade the real-time services affected by the delay issues. Besides, this invention focuses on the designs of the network layer (upper layer) but regardless of the physical layer (RF condition, throughput performance, mobile speed, etc).
US Patent Publication No. 20040076179, “Hybrid UMTS/WLAN Telecommunication System”, has proposed a system in which an interface or an inter-working unit (IWU) is coupled to the radio network controller (RNC) of a 3GPP/UMTS-type system. In this design, however, the controls consider only the load condition for WLAN system but omit the QoS issues, and the procedure for making decisions after RNC receiving the report from IWU is not specified either. This application only provides a rough concept and lacks substantial technical contents, which thus is difficult to implement.
“Policy-Enabled Handoffs Across Heterogeneous Wireless Networks” by Z. H. J. Wang, R. H. Katz, and J. Giese, WMCSA, 1999, also describes a policy-enabled handoff system which allows users to express policies on what is the “best” wireless system at any moment, and make trade-offs among network characteristics such as cost, performance and power consumption. However, this invention only considers the system characteristics without any services, and the bandwidth measurements and quantifications are different for different systems thus cannot be directly used as a comparable value due to the heterogeneous network environment.
So those desired algorithms cannot achieve the goal of the integration (support users the higher QoS environment with all kinds of services). This is the current defect for designing the related schemes for this area.